


hear the voice of rage and ruin

by tarquin



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Gen, mad king au, minecraft au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-15
Updated: 2014-04-15
Packaged: 2018-01-19 13:28:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1471531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tarquin/pseuds/tarquin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Ryan Haywood,” Geoff Ramsey says in a voice too level for a man like himself, “For these atrocities you have committed against your fellow man, as well as the many that you claim still go unaccounted for, there is only one place to send you.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	hear the voice of rage and ruin

**Author's Note:**

> sliiight content warnings for discussion death? it is the mad king and the nether after all, but nothing in-depth.

The wind is frigid and whips against them hard as they gather in front of the altar. Five standing in a semicircle with their backs to the long-set sun, a sixth on his knees before them. The sixth's hands are clasped behind him in wooden stocks and, unlike the others who are dressed heavily in furs and leather, he has only his meager cotton wares against the frozen earth. His bare knees under the kilt he wears are red from where they rest in the snow.

But they know he won’t need extra warmth where he’s going.

The leader of their party beckons for the boy dressed in green to bring his torch closer, and flips open a small leather-bound book when the light hits it. There, in front of the altar, the symbol of their power and prowess and where those who act against them are brought to be tried, he rattles off a list that seems like it could last until sunrise. The man’s crimes, so numerous that it almost seems they will outnumber the book’s pages, are listed until it shuts with a hard snap. The heads of the gathered rise to attention for the official sentencing. 

“Ryan Haywood,” Geoff Ramsey says in a voice too level for a man like himself, “For these atrocities you have committed against your fellow man, as well as the many that _you_ claim still go unaccounted for, there is only one place to send you.”

For the first time the man on his knees speaks, and his voice wavers but not in fear. He is almost laughing, and maybe would be if his teeth weren’t clenched so against the cold.

“You just can’t see fit to kill me, can you?”

One of the others jumps to attention at this, the warrior, whose face curls into a snarl as his hand reaches for the diamond sword at his hilt. But he’s stilled by the raised hand of their leader, and eases back beside his kind.

“Killing you would be a kindness,” Ramsey says, “Though I assure you every man here has want to test their blade on your skin. But you and I know the blood spilled by your body wouldn't be enough to wash away that of the others you massacred, not by a long shot.”

The leader raises his head, eyes steel and cold, illuminated by the single torch light.

“No, Haywood, your punishment is exile. Banishment to the world of red earth and fire, where the other swine walk on two legs like they are men. Your time there, however short, will see to it that your suffering reaches and repays at least a fraction of it that you caused.”

For a moment no one says anything, and the only sound is the hiss of snow that the wind drags along the altar's surface. And then Haywood’s shoulders drop, and his head hangs. No one, of course, is convinced that this is a pitiable motion of defeat, and they continue to stare, motionless, as he speaks.

“Well then.” He says, just above the wind, “So be it.”

His words land as though he is the one to have given permission, but the gathered men do not move into action before their leader gives his say so. Ramsey beckons them closer and points to where he wants the obsidian stacked, he has The Builder lift Haywood’s body into the portal’s opening, and has The Demolisher, the Creeper boy, prepare his flint and steel. 

The Rose Knight steps in as well alongside the convicted man. He has the red of his cloak pulled tight around his shoulders while the clear blue of his pickaxe peeks out underneath. He will make the journey with the criminal, destroy the portal from the inside, and the spellmagic that weaves through his veins will wake him up in his bed on this plane while his body burns in the next.

At the strike of the flint and steel the portal comes alive. Heat and magic pulses within it, and it glows in the dimness, wavering around its intruders.

The gathered stare, cold, as the portal recognizes its guests and starts to hum. And he watches them, the one who had once been the Mad King, and his eyes are just as empty as their own. No fear or certainty in his gaze, only calculated calm as his very essence flickers in and out of their world.

And then it’s over, as he and the knight vanish all together.

Ramsey spares the event no second thought, burying the end of his own axe into the wall of the portal the moment they’re gone, repeatedly striking it until the magic held within it dies. The portal flickers once, twice, and then the diamond end of the pickaxe breaks through the stone, and it ceases being anything but an arrangement of black rock in front of them.

“We’ll take care of the rest tomorrow,” he says to the gathered companions. “Let’s go home.”

 

&&

 

Ray had followed his instructions to the letter upon reaching the nether. The heel of his pointed shoe had buried itself deep into Ryan’s side as they’d settled, and he’d paid him little mind as the man fell to the scalding floor, breath leaving him in a wheeze.

Perhaps Ray would have acted with more conscience, had Ryan not usurped his reign as the King of Roses and parched his fields by drowning the roots of his flowers, his legacy, in blood.

Not that Ryan wasn’t willing to have let bygones be bygones, but Ray had been... less receptive.

Not so much as looking at Ryan’s huddled form on the ground, the knight had hacked at the portal from all directions until it was just rubble on the ground and then dusted off his hands. He’d studied the rose on his lapel, the symbol he wore as remembrance of a time when his hands were cleaner, when things were better, and he’d dropped it by Ryan’s side before strolling calmly off the edge of a cliff nearby.

Ryan was not close enough to where he landed to hear the impact.

 

&&

 

They’d left him to wander and perish in the nether because they knew he would suffer. At its kindest and most forgiving the nether is still a hellscape, and no one who enters does so without knowing that it’s against their odds to live. They do so dressed in armor and armed to the teeth, poised to run back to their portals at the first sign of the tides turning against their favor. Alone, unarmed, unprotected, death is not instant, but it is imminent. The swiftest, easiest way to end it all would have been for Ryan to roll in the direction Ray had went.

But he’d foregone that decision all too quickly, as instead he poised his wrists above smoldering cinders and felt the wood blacken under strain.

They’d put him here to die, but he would not let it be so easy. As though they’d thought his passion for finding loopholes only applied to him in the world of the blue sky.

 

For a while though, he can do nothing but wander. Traipse over the alien world and hiss as the baked earth works against the soles of his boots, and keep his eyes trained forwards, always forwards. His most basic acts of survival come when he falls to his hands and knees and digs shallow caves for safety, or when the tanned skin of a mushroom hides under its red spotted brethren and he uproots it.

For a long time, though time soon ceases to be anything but a foreign concept, he merely wanders. Hides from monsters with dripping flesh and awakens from weak and broken sleep cycles at barrages of flaming brimstone against the caves where he resides. He fights against the elements that entrap him, but only to keep himself alive. 

Only ever in the purpose of gaining ground, of putting one foot in front of another.

What was the name he’d had walking into Achievement City, before he was branded the Mad King?

Ah, yes. The Vagabond. 

 

The title chases him once more in the nether, he does not wear it again on his shoulders.

Especially not on the day, that term used loosely, when his calloused and blistered hands break through another layer of netherrack and instead of the same red wasteland he’d been walking for who knows how long, his eyes would drink in the sight of Dark Achievement City.

He’d been here before, of course. Clustered around his comrades, dodging attacks and playing along with their games, thinking nothing particularly special of the mirror copy of their earthly homes. There had once been a portal to the upperworold as well, but they’d beaten him there by far, only one obsidian block remaining out of the several.

The rest of it is the same however. Same wooden structures and stone walls and every telltale sign that people had come here once and made one conceited effort to call this place home.

But the nether is cruel. Endlessly unforgiving, and it doesn’t merely let one survive just by being there. It made them work for every inch of progress you gain, and it punished them for receiving it as well. The only, only kindness it afforded them free of charge, was death.

Eventually they’d abandoned it, around the time it started showing up in their nightmares and leaving scars on their palms.

 

Now though, Ryan stands upon Ray’s roof and lets the bits of soul sand crumble under his feet until he’s poised on the glowing stone that borders their emblem. He walks the border of the obsidian and runs his hands along the nearly forgotten textures of wood and earthly stone. At that, his fingers twitch with the memory of forging tools.

He enters to the house that had been built to be his own, slides his boot over the glass made to parody that which began this whole mess.

He steps out, and gazes upon the abandoned city.

What better place could there be for a dark king to rule.

 

&&

It’s a long time before they come for him. By his accounts, what must be months. Months for his body to be lost to lava, for the beasts to have claimed him first. He doesn’t expect them to come for him at all, really. They’d long abandoned this place and deemed anything inside of it not worth their efforts or lives. He’d assumed that would include himself as well.

But if anything, he takes it as a point of pride. That so long after he’d walked their earthly fields, his presence still remains and burns within them. And from the tight and raised voices that climb over those of the howling monsters, he finds protest in their party. The warrior one, diamond sword no doubt in its holster slung over his back, complains loudly that their search is futile. The Builder, Ryan’s voice twin, agrees. But they are shushed by their leader, who instead murmurs something to his assistant, the creeper boy.

Ryan can not find their names in his mind so filled with blood and fire, but he remembers their leader. He remembers the one who sentenced him here to die.

It doesn’t take long for them to agree to rebuild their portal at the heart of Dark Achievement City, as it will spare them a trek back to the motherworld. And it takes so much of Ryan’s strength only to smile, only to caress the hilt of the sword next to him, even as the Rose Knight crests the land just above the creeper boy’s home.

 

Humans, he finds in their first seconds of eye contact, have become strange, ugly creatures in his time away from them. So used to marred and molded skulls of the pigmen he’s slain, something whole and flesh and alive seems… wrong, in a way. Not that it in any way takes away from the look of horror that crosses those sentient eyes when they find him.

“Oh, _fuck_.”

What? What is it? Another ghast? They ask, one by one stepping over the red earth until they see him. And one by one their ugly, human faces contort in all shapes of confusion and terror and awe.

Killing the first pigman had been a challenge. As well as the second, and tenth, and several-several after that. Their power had challenged his by far, especially when he’d been hacking at him with wooden and stone swords. But persistence and effort and scars had given him what he’d needed to overpower them. And while it had not been easy, and while it had taken time, (months, in fact,) he’d soon found his hands filled with the tools to rule with once more.

He’d molded the crown first, purely out of his long-neglected hubris. Then his golden pickaxes began carving smoothly through stone. Though they broke often, it always seemed there was another few squealing beasts around to leave more gold behind with their bodies. And once that gold found itself grounds for a mighty throne, the title of the Mad King rose again, more powerful than it had ever been.

 

And now those who had once called him brother, then traitor, stare at him. They are so human, so afraid, with jaws dropped and swords steadily raising. He smirks.

“My friends,” He purrs, and is almost startled by the ways that language molds itself off his tongue, almost as though the words had been lying in wait for so, so long, “Welcome to my court.”

He raises a hand, and from the dug out rows of netherrack heads start to turn. Gold swords are grasped by malformed, inhuman hands and the stench of rotted flesh rolls out from the shadows. Suddenly there are many, many eyes trained on their party, but it’s the King’s gaze that is cruel.

“I believe we have much to discuss.”

**Author's Note:**

> (he didn't die of thirst because you can't get dehydrated in minecraft BYE)


End file.
